Eric Johnson, a civil affairs officer in the Marine Reserves, has a withering analysis of WaPo’s coverage of the Iraq War entitled, “How Media Get Iraq Wrong.” Soldiers and Marines point to the slow, steady progress in almost all area…

Puhleeze. I live in Washington and read Getler every week. He’s an apologist, a parser of the meaning of “is”, if you know what I mean. He circles wagons around his “journalist” colleagues. In a word: joke.

I don’t disagree with your assesment, but I think you missed my point. Even if they are likely to ignore or give a half-assed response, they still can be apprised of what people think.

If they are going to ignore the story anyway, would you prefer them to ignore it in the relative peace of just a few phone calls/emails asking “where in the hell is this story?” Or would it be better that they ignore it with hundreds or thousands asking “Where?” i’m not suggesting turning the pressure up in a sure fire way of getting a response, I’m suggesting turning up the pressure because i expect little or no response. Because every once in a while, when the pressure mounts, cracks form.

chthus could be right. Even the Warsaw Pact was destroyed when enough eastern europeans got upset enough to start marching. The Washington Post and New York Times are going to be rocked off their foundations when the people finally decide to do something about the propaganda sheets.

Hemingway wrote a story about a similar situation during the Spanish Civil War. The name of the piece escapes me, but it dealt with a newspaper reporter showing up and writing at length about ‘the terror’ that was in the streets.

This puzzled Heminway who, having been in Madrid for the past several months, did not know what the hell the reporter was talking about.

The reporter then tried to get a girl to carry some confidential papers for him out of the country.

Anyway, if somebody can remember the title, it might make for an interesting comparision.

In 1978-79 I did two tours on the MiddleEast command ship USS LaSalle as a member of the Helo Crew(there was no other Helo in our area at the time) and our aircrew marked an Iranian oil rig postion with a smoke marker. A week later that was carried by AP wire as “Americans drop napalm on Iranian oil rig” Biased journalism has a long history. After 20 years of military service working on airplanes and helos I can look in the sky and usually tell you what airplane is flying overhead. Having reporters show me stock footage of the wrong ship, wrong airplane, wrong tank etc..is just common place . They are basically lazy and most fall to the lower end of the bell curve(which applies to all professions).